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Our second-to-none engineers have launched a utility today that has been developed internally to help with VMware vRealize Operations management: the vROps CLI tool! It is now publicly available for free on Github for linux, Mac and Windows on our public repository.

As you can guess this utility allows you to interact from the command line with your vROps instance: install adapters, list alerts,… And of course this opens the door to some nifty scripts to automate tasks in your environment… like installing those great new Blue Medora management packs:

vropscli uploadPak OracleDatabase-6.3_1.2.0_b20180319.144115.pak

The usage.md file has some instructions and there is an examples directory with scripts.

Expect more info here and on our company blog, or stop by our booth at VMworld EMEA to have a chat!

One of the management packs for VMware vRealize Operations that has evolved the most over the past two years is the Pivotal Cloud Foundry solution. From connecting through our own open -source nozzle to using the BOSH API, Blue Medora now enables you to monitor all aspects of your PCF deployment, including apps. Today we publish yet another set of enhancements. This is one of the most comprehensive solutions on the market to monitor PCF and how it runs on your VMware environment.

PCF infrastructure dashboard

Features in this Release Include:

Added BOSH Job resource kind, which serves as a catch-all resource for any BOSH job (including BOSH metrics) not covered by other previously-defined resource kinds (See: Resource Kinds and Relationships)

Updated Blue Medora Nozzle Tile to include timeseries for historical data to enable improved alerts (NOTE: Be sure to upgrade the management pack prior to upgrading to the new nozzle version. See: Upgrading the Management Pack.)

Linkedin published a new version of their iOS app today and it has a feature that I am going to use *a lot* at meetings, VMUGs, conferences… I think it might even revitalise my use of Linkedin. It’s profile QR codes. I heard about it through Engadget.

Basically if you click the QR icon in the search bar in the main screen, it allows you to display a QR code with link to your profile that others can scan. Or you can scan other QR codes. Since Apple now has easy QR scanning in the camera app (just point camera at any QR code), this is a great tool that is going to save me a lot of business cards and scanning in other cards.

My Linkedin profile QR code

Of course you want to make sure to update your contact details and visibility, I added for instance Blue Medora’s product matrix….

At Blue Medora we still have a very popular plugin for Oracle Enterprise Manager to monitor Postgres databases. With the number of customers moving to Postgres or supporting dual database environments on the rise, it is important to give the DBA the opportunity to keep monitoring his environment from his existing monitoring platform. The plugin integrates in the OEM dashboards and gives you a lot of details on Postgres.

OEM Postgres plugin query overview

Last year we upgraded the software to support Postgres databases running on AWS RDS, now at the request of several customers we upgraded to support postgres v10. We also have trial versions available now!

Good news if you saw the announcement of VMware vRealize Operations v6.7 yesterday. We worked hard with VMware so that all our management packs are ready for use with this new version! The capacity planning engine has been overhauled a lot, so we wrote a KB article to explain the differences.

HPE 3PAR capacity dashboard

Blue Medora product management have published a partial list of latest versions to use. These also include other updates. The list is not complete yet, but more will follow. For a documentation and data sheets see the product matrix and contact sales there for a demo and trial or email sales@bluemedora.com.

The driving force in IT for me has always been commoditization. There is probably another blog post here, but we moved from the Bios to the processor, to storage and the network. Everything becomes a commodity at some point, or do you still care what BIOS version your server has? If you still have a server?

In 2008 I attended a CloudCamp where people were asking vendors: “but how do I move workloads between cloud providers?”. Of course there was no answer because public cloud was not a commodity back then, it was just an emerging tech and they all wanted to monetize. Compare your AWS prices from back then to now if you don’t believe me…

Today I realize that containers are making cloud a commodity finally. It does not matter if you run your Docker containers in AWS or Azure or other cloud services. The apps and services remain the same. With Docker Enterprise Edition – the vCenter of Docker – you can manage them all from one pane. I realized that even more with the announcement of IBM Cloud support in Docker EE in the keynote this morning. So now you have AWS, Azure and IBM cloud support built-in for your swarm clusters (and soon kubernetes). Google cloud is experimental at the moment I understand. I played around with Docker for Mac CE deploying a swarm to AWS and I must say the experience is seemless.

So there you go: when all your apps run in containers, they can be moved around on different clouds or even run on different ones in one stack!

So where is the ‘spiel’ now you ask? In added services from those cloud providers. IBM showed in the keynote adding image recognition and Watson lookup in a traditional pet store app. Watson, Alexa and the likes are the proprietary differentiators now. For a next blog…